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Chevy Volt - 230 mpg Yeah right
This pretty much sums up my opinion of hybrid technology.
From Popular Science:
The battery that will power the Chevrolet Volt weighs approximately 400 pounds and, stood on end, reaches a height of six feet. The $10,000 plus, T-shaped monolith contains 300 individual three-volt lithium-ion cells, bundled together in groups of three, then wired in series and kept from overheating by an elaborate liquid cooling mechanism. A computerized monitoring system inside the battery pack conducts this electrical orchestra, balancing voltage, watching, above all, for any indication that a cell might be failing, shorting out, or otherwise threatening the stability of the system. This battery, one of the most advanced pieces of electrical storage ever engineered, can propel the 3500-pound Volt 40 miles before it runs out of energy. And so can a gallon of gas.
--Nick Koloterakis, "Power Struggle", _Popular Science_, November 2008
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Chevy Volt - 230 mpg Yeah right
Well now KW you don't believe ever word of advertisment put out by the big corparate liars association????
If the Volt has no gasoline or diesel engine then what does it get 230 MPG of????
The only source of energy we have is the sun. It just depends if the sun grew the plants and animals that turned into oil or if the sun makes the wind blow to turn a turbine making the electricity to power the Volt.
Energy made into electricity from wind, solar panels, hydro electric dams powwering the Volt is a true replacable source of energy. Problem is of course i8f every car truck, farm tractor, motorcycle, locomotive, etc, etc. were battery powered from the grid we would brown out every light bulb in the country.
The only real advantage a hybrid has is capturing the energy created by the braking of the car. I have a hard time believeing that is enough to justify all the contraptions to save it.
I have a friend who claims he buys a new Prius every year thru some tax savings on his federal return? Is this real or is he just blowing smoke? If this is true then here we go again spending our tax dollars to fund an off shore owned car producer.
Now we have Obama trying to ram a health care packager down our throats before anyone has a chance to understand what is in it.
Wow, I'm steamin today.
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Chevy Volt - 230 mpg Yeah right
I suspect that government ownership of GM had something to do with that ridiculous mpg rating.
C'mon, mpg means nothing to an electric car. What they need is a yellow sticker like they place on appliances, you know the ones - this Chevy Volt will cost $5000/year to charge if you drive 12000 miles/year and your energy costs 15 cents/kwh. Gasoline is extra. This cost should include the cost to replace the $10k battery since batteries are consumables, unlike gas tanks, and also the costs to dispose of the toxic batteries without polluting the groundwater.
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Chevy Volt - 230 mpg Yeah right
Ken, you are probably too young to remeber the wind up toy cars. But don't worry, the Fred Flintstone powered car is next.
I do agree, who is the nuckle head who thinks of a MPG with electric but since Cap and Trade and the cost of electricty is expected to about triple it might be gas will cost less for the up to 40 mile per day drive.
Wonder how the cabin is heated?
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Chevy Volt - 230 mpg Yeah right
I'm all for electric cars but we need to build the infrastructure first.
A few months ago in Popular Mechanics there was an article about small, sealed, self-contained and inherently safe nuclear plants that could be trucked in to a community, buried, hooked up to the local grid and power tens of thousands of homes for twenty years. At the end of its life it was to designed to get dug up, replaced with a new one, and trucked to a reprocessing facility to be refueled and shipped out again. This makes all kinds of sense - freedom from interstate grids eliminates the single point of failure and communities could easily add units as growth demands.
We'd need this type of infrastructure to support electric cars for all. Until then, drill, drill, drill.
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Chevy Volt - 230 mpg Yeah right
Wonder if there is a way to produce energy from radio signals of sufficient amount to power anything?
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Chevy Volt - 230 mpg Yeah right
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Wonder if there is a way to produce energy from radio signals of sufficient amount to power anything?
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Warning, I'm not a EE so what follows is semi-educated conjecture.
In fact it is possible but not practical for a bunch of reasons. You wouldn't get much power (think micro, nano or pico watts) unless you were right next to the transmitter. Then there is the fact that if you were to produce power from the radio waves it would cause a parasitic signal loss that would weaken the signal for everyone else, so the power would need to be boosted, then more people would produce power, requiring more power input, etc, etc.
There are systems that do produce power from radio waves though, like those microchips they inject into pets or some "smart cards" that are used to control access into buildings. And those systems use special readers that transmit for the purpose of power generation so they can communicate with the device.
They are working on wireless power distribution though... I wonder how cooked we'll be when it's all working.
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Chevy Volt - 230 mpg Yeah right
My brother spent a big part of his career working on the electric vehicle program for a utility company. He said that one advantage of the Volt is that every time it runs on batteries it is using domestically produced energy instead of imported oil. Nearly all domestic energy production is coal, nuclear, hydro, or natural gas, all produced domestically. So that's a bonus. Apparently the energy cost of the volt would be 1-2 cents/mile (before cap-and-tax) when running on batteries, but of course that doesn't factor in the initial cost premium, replacement battery cost or charging station cost .. not to mention that we don't have enough domestic energy production to charge a whole bunch of cars anyway. Much of the charging would be off-peak but I'd bet 25-30% would be done on-peak.
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Chevy Volt - 230 mpg Yeah right
There was a big fuss in the media up here a while back, all because an electric car made near here is a success, but you can't take one for a test drive out the door of the factory it's made in, That's because it's not legal to drive them on the road here in Canada yet.
We don't have an equivalent to the NEV that exists south of the border.
In a strange twist of fate though, it's legal to operate a moped, or an electric bicycle on the public streets though.
When it was in the news we were discussing it over coffee one morning, myself (an engineer) and a retired electrical engineer from the electrical utility in our area were crunching the numbers.
We figured that in the end, all the inefficiencies lumped together meant that it actually polluted more than several diesel cars did.
The other issue is that they are already threatening rolling brown-outs and black-outs on hot days because there isn't enough electricity to go around now.
The manufacturers also have two big obstacles to overcome in order to gain consumer acceptance of these purely electric-powered vehicles.
The first is that a purely electric vehicle has no adequate means of producing cabin heat. They can make some heat, but I suspect it's nowhere near enough to overcome the cold the north sees for a good part of the year.
Secondly, and another biggy, if they make marginal power just to move the vehicle, there is no allowance for 'wasted' power to run things like A/C either.
I just couldn't imagine driving in most urban environments and being stuck in a traffic jam in an e-Car with no A/C on a sweltering hot day and not having any A/C.
My two cents worth.
Best of luck.
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Chevy Volt - 230 mpg Yeah right
Murf, I somehow had the idea that the ZENN was approved in Quebec and BC.
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